Pages: 174-179

CORRECTIONS TO THE MANUSCRIPT OF THE ARTICLE "SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AND THE PROVISIONAL REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT."
NOS. 13 AND 14 OF *VPERYOD*, APRIL 5 AND 12 (MARCH 26 AND 30) 1905.
[Social Democracy and Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship.]

**Social Democracy and the Provisional Revolutionary Government.**

**I.**

Only five years ago the slogan "Down with autocracy!" [seemed premature, untimely, incomprehensible to the working masses, seemed such to a great many representatives of social democracy] seemed premature to many representatives of social democracy. These representatives were rightly classed as opportunists. They were and have been explained to that they are lagging behind the movement, [that they are trailing in its wake] that they do not understand the tasks of the party as the vanguard of the class, as its leader, educator, and organizer of the class, as the representative of the movement as a whole, its fundamental and main objectives, which** may temporarily be obscured by everyday [practice] work, but should never lose their significance as the guiding star for the struggling proletariat.

And now the time has come when the revolutionary flame has engulfed the entire country, when even the most skeptical have come to believe in [the inevitability of the overthrow of autocracy in the near future] [when this inevitability was seen by the least far-sighted people and the least progressive sections of the people]... After all, the closer we approach the direct [practical] implementation of our immediate political tasks, the greater the necessity to understand these tasks with complete clarity, the more harmful are all ambiguities, half-measures, or muddled thinking on this question.

...And if we are advancing the practical demand for the immediate overthrow of the autocratic government, then we must clarify for ourselves [and for others] precisely what other government we wish to put in place of the government being overthrown, [in other words] or to put it differently: how do we regard the relationship of social democracy to the provisional revolutionary government?

...And their reactionary views on this [question] are most fully developed in Martyanov's pamphlet "Two Dictatorships"...

At the very beginning of his pamphlet, Martyanov frightens us with such a terrible prospect: if a strong organization of revolutionary social democracy were able to "appoint and carry out a nationwide armed uprising" against autocracy, which [the "Jacobin"] Lenin dreamed of, would it not be "obvious that nationwide will would appoint this very party as the provisional government immediately after the revolution"?...

...For indeed, the [reforms] transformations they are striving for would ensure the rule of another class, the peasant bourgeoisie...

**II.**

...Engels speaks of the political ruin of one who unconsciously strays from his own class road onto another class road, and the clever Martyanov, reverently quoting Engels, speaks of the ruin of one who will go further [further than the tail-ists] and further along the correct class road.

The difference between the viewpoints [tactics] of revolutionary social democracy and tail-ism emerges here with complete obviousness. [Backing away from the task] Martyanov and the new Iskra are backing away from the task that falls upon the proletariat together with the peasantry—of the most radical democratic transformation, backing away from social democratic leadership of this transformation, [retreating before bourgeois democracy] thus surrendering, however unconsciously, the interests of the proletariat into the hands of bourgeois democracy...

...To confuse the participation of the proletariat in power resisting the socialist transformation with the participation of the proletariat in the democratic revolution means hopelessly to misunderstand what is at issue. It is the same as confusing Millerand's participation in the ministry of corrupt Panamists with Varlin's participation in the Commune, [which did not aim at socialist revolution] which defended and upheld the republic....

...The whole matter again comes down to the difference between democratic and socialist transformation, which Martyanov forgets, to the existence of that gigantic peasant and petty bourgeois population, which is capable of supporting the democratic transformation but at the present moment [absolutely] is not capable of supporting the socialist one.

**III.**

...Martyanov heard that it is unbecoming for a socialist to participate in a bourgeois ministry (when the conditions* involve the struggle for socialist transformation) and hastened to "understand" this to mean that one should not participate together with revolutionary bourgeois democracy in the revolutionary-democratic transformation and in that dictatorship which is necessary for the complete [consistent] implementation of such a transformation. Martyanov read our minimum program, but failed to notice that the strict distinction it makes between transformations achievable on the basis of bourgeois society as opposed to socialist transformations has not merely academic [, not merely dogmatic] significance, [which Marxist scholastics are happy to attribute to it,] but the most vital, practical significance; [subject to being] that it is subject** to immediate*** verification and application in reality during the revolutionary period... Is it not clear [at first glance] that the implementation of these transformations on the basis of the bourgeois order is unthinkable without the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the lower classes? Is it not clear that we are speaking here precisely not of the proletariat alone in distinction from the "bourgeoisie" ([as the scholastic reasons, applying categories of the bourgeois order that are completely finished and pure on the eve of its collapse] but of the "lower classes," which are the active movers of every democratic transformation?... But it is even more undeniable that in the interests of this mass lies the complete implementation of democracy, and that the more enlightened this mass becomes, the more inevitable its [decisive, desperate] struggle for this complete implementation. [The conscious leader of the proletariat] The social democrat will never forget, of course, the dual political-economic nature of the petty bourgeois urban and rural mass; he will never forget the necessity for separate and independent class organization of the proletariat struggling for socialism. But he will not forget either that this mass possesses "in addition to its past, a future; in addition to its prejudices, Understanding," that impels it forward toward revolutionary-democratic dictatorship*; that enlightenment [(which this mass so lacks)] is given not by books alone, and not even so much by books as by the very course of the revolution, [shaking it] opening [its] eyes, giving [it] political schooling. Under such conditions, a theory that rejects the idea of revolutionary-democratic dictatorship cannot be called anything other than a philosophical examination of the "backwardness" of the Russian proletariat**.

The revolutionary social democrat will cast off such a theory with contempt. On the eve of the revolution, he will not only point out [the worst possible outcome] of it [(And never again will he see this worst possible outcome in the form of the impossible and unthinkable "restoration of absolutism in its original form")]. No, he will also point to the possibility of a better outcome. He will dream—he is obliged to dream, if he is not a hopeless Philistine—of how, after the gigantic experience of Europe, after the unprecedented scope of the energy of the working class in Russia [under the oppression of the most incredible Asiatic conditions], we shall succeed in kindling, as never before, the torch of revolutionary light before the dark and downtrodden mass [of urban and rural poor], we shall succeed—thanks to the fact that we stand on the shoulders of a whole series of revolutionary generations of Europe—in implementing with unprecedented fullness all democratic transformations, our entire minimum program; we shall succeed in achieving that the Russian revolution be a movement embracing not merely a few months, but many years, that it lead not to mere concessions* of the ruling powers, but to their complete overthrow. And if we succeed in this—then... then the revolutionary fire will ignite Europe; [then] the European worker, worn out [for decades of gray and dreary] bourgeois reaction, will rise in his turn; then he [will] * show us [in his turn,] "how it is done"; then the revolutionary upsurge of Europe will exert a reverse effect on Russia and transform an epoch of a few revolutionary years into an epoch of a few revolutionary decades, then...

But [we will not fall into Quixotism] we shall **still** have more than one opportunity to speak of what we shall do "then," to speak not from the cursed Genevan distance, but before thousands-strong gatherings of workers on the streets of Moscow and Petersburg, before free [popular] assemblies of Russian "muzhiks."

**IV.**

To the Philistines of the new Iskra and its "arbiter of minds," our good scholastic Martyanov, such dreams are alien and strange, naturally. They fear the complete implementation** of our entire minimum program through the revolutionary dictatorship of "the people," the simple and common people. They fear for their own consciousness, [lest they] fear losing [their leadership of us] the prompting from their memorized (but not thought-through) books, [lest they] fear proving unable to distinguish the correct and bold steps of democratic transformations from the adventurist leaps of non-class, Populist socialism or anarchism....

...Parvus finally managed to move forward instead of backpedaling like a crab. He did not want to do the "Sisyphean task" of endless corrections to endless Martyanov and Martov stupidities. He came forward directly (unfortunately, together with [the loudmouth] Trotsky [in the preface to his loudmouthed pamphlet "Before January"]) in defense of the idea of revolutionary-democratic dictatorship, the idea of the obligation of social democracy to assume participation in the provisional revolutionary government after the overthrow of autocracy. Parvus is a thousand times right when he says that social democracy should not [fear taking responsibility for the provisional government, should not] fear bold steps forward, should not fear dealing joint "blows" to the enemy hand in hand with revolutionary bourgeois democracy, provided that [very aptly recalled [by Parvus]) the condition of not confusing organizations is observed; go separately, strike together; do not conceal the heterogeneity of interests; watch your ally as you would watch your enemy, and so forth.

But the more ardent our sympathy with all these slogans of the revolutionary social democrat [who has turned away from the tail-ists] *, the more unpleasantly struck us certain false notes struck by Parvus... But the reader cannot have in mind only the tail-ists, and among [the enemies] dangerous friends of the revolution from the camp of revolutionaries, besides tail-ists, there are quite other people: there are "socialist-revolutionaries," there are people drawn along by the tide of events, helpless before revolutionary phrases, like Nadezhdins, or such people whose instinct [seeks to] replaces revolutionary worldview (like Gapon)....

...It is already raising them, it will raise them, this matter is facilitated by its [own] convulsive [efforts] resistance by the government itself, but naturally [that] about conscious political consciousness, about social democratic consciousness of these masses and their numerous "original," popular, and even muzhik leaders, there can be no talk. They cannot now, without undergoing [a long and long] series of revolutionary trials, become social democrats....

...moving forward unflinchingly and boldly, not fearing revolutionary-democratic dictatorship, but passionately desiring it, fighting for the republic and complete republican freedom, for serious economic reforms, in order to create for themselves a truly [free] broad and truly worthy 20th-century arena for the struggle for socialism.

[* Regarding Trotsky's pamphlet with a preface by Parvus, published in the party printing house, Iskra maintains modest silence on the substance of the question raised. It is, naturally, not advantageous for it to unravel the confusion: Martyanov goes one way, Parvus another, and we keep silent, later Plekhanov will pull Martyanov by the ears! This is what is called among us "ideological leadership of the party"! By the way, one "formalistic" curiosity. Our Solomons in the Council have decreed that a party designation is permissible only on pamphlets published by commission of party organizations. It would be interesting to learn from the Solomons which organization commissioned the publication of pamphlets by Nadezhdin, Trotsky, and others! Or were those right who declared the above "decree" a stupid* circle's outburst against Lenin's publishing house?]

* The word "stupid" was replaced by Olminsky with "worthless." Ed.